How to Form a Business Continuity Plan

If you are a businessman the last thing you want to think about is anything that may disrupt your business. According to studies, in the last two years, over 97% of businesses had to handle at least one outage. Thankfully, business continuity planning will allow you to go on with your business as usual. Here is how to form a business a plan.

Accepts the potential risks and trends facing your business

Thinking about the disruption your business operation can be so scary. Once you can accept that there are threats and the risks can affect your business you can make a plan that ensures your personal and business are ideally protected.

Business analysis plan should address the potential risks that may happen to your business. This is especially true when the ability to function has been affected by the threat risk. This means developing a business continuity plan will enable you to determine the risks, issues, and threats that your company needs to address. You should consider any possible threats such as increased expenses, lost sales, and income, regulatory fines, tardiness in service delivery among others.

Prepare a plan for each function or service

You also need to use the action template to maintain the essential services. This template should include a description of the function and the service, business impact, back up individuals, action plans, and resource needs.

Know the main recovery resources

It’s also important to make a list of key recovery resources. Depending on the occurrence of an event, you need to immediately mobilize the key personnel in order to successfully develop a business continuity plan. Make a list of the main backups and internal personnel. You can make the list as big as necessary or as small as possible. In addition, you need to know which job functions as are very important to continue with your job operations. However, these should include the business executives.

Do a business impact analysis

Developing a business continuity plan is one of the major steps in business. Through the BCP, the team will be able to forecast and predict. It will also assist the team in collecting the information that can assist when it comes to coming up with the strategies that can be included by the company.

Document any important document

Business computers usually contain very important business information that your business and employees must access when working on the site. You should have a list of very important business data and have a strategy that can help you to secure the documents in case there is a disaster. Do not forget about the software. The list should also include identification data, passwords, and the location of the key data.

Identify your contingency location

The contingency location is the place where you will do your business when your primary location is not there. This could be a hotel equipped with business equipment and facilities that you might use. It could also be a rental facility near your main site where you can store your goods and relocate. Moreover, it could be available telecommunication service. Once you have a temporary location, you need to have a map to the location.

Make sure you modify and update your BCP

Regardless of how your BCP is you need to know that there will be disruptive events that may not be included in your plan. You, therefore, need to be open in updating your plan and modifying it depending on the additional information that you have. Every time something alters you need to update and modifies all the copies so that it never comes out of date.

When it comes to developing a business continuity plan, being accurate is very important. You also need to remain relevant at all the times. You also need to write it in such a way that it’s understood by everyone who reads it. Developing a business continuity plan is, therefore, one of the most important things to do.